How to make gdb works on Mac

If you just install gdb by brew and expect it works out-of-box, you must be upset and angry at last. Because it will pop up a message as:

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Unable to find Mach task port for process-id 23330: (os/kern) failure (0x5).
 (please check gdb is codesigned - see taskgated(8))

If you search how to solve it by Google, you might lucky see a post at first matched result. I see some pride answers from Apple fun.

I am a pretty long time, almost 20 years Apple fun too from my first iPod classic. But I think Apple product is far from a friendly environment to a programmer.

To solve this issue. The solution is the following.

launch Keychain Access.app, and select ‘Certificate Assistant > Create a Certificate’ from the menu.

step1

select ‘Code Signing’

set Validaty Period to 7300, longest time I can tried out.

step3

set Keychain location to ‘System’

step4

back the first screen of Key Access.app, and find the new certificate, right-click the item and select ‘Get Info’

step5

change ‘Code Signing’ to ‘Always Trust’

key in ‘security dump-trust-settings -d’ command in Terminal.app. You will see something like

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$ security dump-trust-settings -d                                                                                                                                                                               44|1 ↵  10080  15:28:31
Number of trusted certs = 3
Cert 0: Alipay Local Service
   Number of trust settings : 0
Cert 1: gdb_codesign
   Number of trust settings : 1
   Trust Setting 0:
      Policy OID            : Code Signing
Cert 2: gdb-cert
   Number of trust settings : 1
   Trust Setting 0:
      Policy OID            : Code Signing
      Allowed Error         : CSSMERR_TP_CERT_EXPIRED
      Result Type           : kSecTrustSettingsResultTrustRoot

create a gdb.xml file

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>com.apple.security.cs.debugger</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>
</pre>

run ‘codesign –entitlements gdb.xml -fs gdb-cert $(which gdb)’

run ‘codesign -d –entitlements - $(which gdb)’, you will see output same content as gdb.xml

if you still got gdb stuck when you run

Probably you need to run ‘sudo DevToolsSecurity -disable’ and key in ‘set startup-with-shell off’ when gdb launched to console (after you killed the gdb is stuck).

Above is what I learned this afternoon.